[racket-dev] Survey for DrRacket users related to automatic parentheses behavior

On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Nick Shelley <nickmshelley at gmail.com>wrote:

> For what it's worth, Xcode differentiates these cases by inserting a
> temporary closing paren that is gray instead of black. You can make it
> permanent by arrowing over it, typing it yourself, tabbing over it, or just
> moving the cursor outside the matching parens. When it becomes permanent it
> is black like the other text and you have to delete it individually, but
> while it is still gray it will be deleted automatically if you delete the
> opening paren.
>
> I sort of like this behavior, and the visual difference gets rid of any
> potential confusion.
>

Yes, I believe Eclipse does something like this too, maybe not with such a
visual sort of indication. I agree that it's very cool functionality but it
requires really thorough tracking of some hidden state as Robby says
(history of the users' key and/or mouse interaction) and I don't think I'm
going to go for this right now.



> On Saturday, November 24, 2012, Robby Findler wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 8:53 AM, Laurent <laurent.orseau at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 3:11 PM, Nadeem Abdul Hamid <nadeem at acm.org>
>> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 4:03 AM, Laurent <laurent.orseau at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> If you can, I think it would be a good idea to remove the paren pair
>> if
>> >>> the user deletes the opening paren he just typed by mistake. Undo
>> should do
>> >>> the same (which apparently it does not currently; missing
>> >>> 'begin/end-edit-sequence' ?).
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Yeah, the undo behavior I've fixed. The first scenario you mention
>> might
>> >> be tricky - how do you distinguish between typing an open paren and
>> then
>> >> immediately deleting it vs. typing an open paren, making a bunch of
>> other
>> >> edits, and then coming back and deleting the open paren?
>> >
>> >
>> > I think it would already be good enough to only consider the case
>>  where the
>> > user types the paren and wants to remove them immediately (e.g., he
>> placed
>> > them in the wrong place, or wanted square brackets instead, or just
>> changed
>> > his mind).
>> > In the case of meanwhile edits, I don't think the user would bother
>> deleting
>> > the closing paren himself.
>>
>> I think that hidden state like this can lead to confusing behavior.
>> Probably you want to have deleting a paren do the same thing,
>> regardless of what the character most recently typed was.
>>
>> Robby
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